This evening was the 5th grade Colonial Living History Museum event at our elementary school.

This is a major highlight for 5th graders, who prepare for weeks to dress and act like a character from the US Revolutionary War era. Our fifth grade daughter was Catherine Barry, known as the “heroine of Cowpens.”

Our current elementary school in Edmond is pretty huge, with around 800 total kids. This panoramic photo I took this evening of the cafeteria as the event got underway reflects how many students as well as parents are in the five fifth grade classes at our school.

The students initially paraded into the cafeteria, and performed a short, colonial-era dance together.

Next, students spread out throughout the building and took up their places as characters in a “living history museum.” Visitors (parents and siblings) could “push their button” on their nametags, and students would come to life sharing a one or two minute memorized script about the life and accomplishments of their historical person. After repeating her script more times than she could count tonight, Sarah agreed to let me record her performance after we got home. It was a LOT quieter to record at home than it would have been at school!

It was interesting to notice how many cameras were in hands tonight, and how many of the younger attendees were using smartphones as their cameras!

This was a great event and one I know Sarah will remember forever. Our son, Alexander, is in 7th grade now and clearly remembers his night as “Henry Knox!”

In my social studies class we got to sign the Declaration of Indepandence! You get to pick what type of writing you want. You can choose Colonist,American or Patriot. You can choose black and white or color. It will give some background info. too. Also you will need a printer for this activity. I think this will get the students involved in history and it is a very cool activity to do in class.

Alexander: Since you were not able to join Sarah and I to watch President Obama’s speech today “live,” I’d like you to watch the speech and then compose a response you can either post here on Learning Signs, record as a video on YouTube, or record as an audio message via AudioBoo. Let me know if you need help with either option 2 or 3. 🙂

Also check out Sarah’s response, and the comments others have left for her there. She may need to record a follow-up video to answer some of those questions!

Our family visited Pearl Harbor today. Rachel and I recorded six new Audioboos tonight, reflecting on things we saw and learned today. These are all linked from my AudioBoo profile page. Since I am mobile blogging this from my iPhone I can’t embed the Audioboos, but I will link them separately below.

My AudioBoo account is linked to Twitter so a link to this was automatically tweeted out, but when I posted this with WordPress for iPhone I was NOT able to copy/paste the actual embed code unfortunately. It would be great if AudioBoo would adapt their mobile interface to permit copying of the embed code on an iPhone.

Yes, the annual Medieval Festival in Norman, Oklahoma, IS a good time for all. Except, of course, if you’re a teenager who gets into a child’s swing and gets so stuck the Norman Fire Department has to come cut your swing down so you can get out of it!

We did some in-the-field documentation of Rachel and Sarah’s perceptions of our evening in Norman using AudioBoo on my iPhone. These were the first AudioBoos we’ve recorded and uploaded over the EDGE network connection, rather than WiFi. It took a lot longer for the upload, but they DID work! Here are more of Rachel’s thoughts about her camel ride:

In third grade you have to do a few different book reports and this is my second book report. It is on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and here is her timeline, but there will be another one on her character traits!

On Thursday, April 10, 2008, we are going to participate in a live videoconference with one of the sea captains Sue Waters works with at a maritime academy in Perth, Australia. Perth is on the other side of the world from where we live in Edmond, Oklahoma. They are 11 hours ahead of us. This means that when we start the videoconference at 8:30 pm US Central Time on Thursday, it will be 9:30 am the next day (Friday) in Perth. It will be 1:30 AM on Friday April 11th GMT time. This webpage from the WorldTimeServer website shows the relative times in our locations. We will be participating in this videoconference just before going to bed on Thursday night, Sue and the others in Western Australia will be just starting their morning of work on Friday! You can use this WorldTimeServer converter page to determine what time it will be where you live when this live videoconference takes place.

Sue is going to try and broadcast this conference over Ustream.tv using her Ustream channel. If she runs into trouble she is going to use Skype and call us directly, and we will record the call to share later. Hopefully Ustream will work, however, so more people can join in. We successfully tested a Skype connection between Oklahoma and Western Australia last night.

Sue asked us to brainstorm some questions we’d like to ask to an experienced sea captain prior to our videoconference. The following is the list we came up with tonight after dinner! If you have more questions to add, feel free to add them as comments to this post or just send them directly to Sue via her Twitter account. (@dswaters)

As the crow flies (or perhaps an SR-71) Perth is 10,545 miles away from Edmond. (We used Google Earth to calculate this distance.) The following map shows our relative locations on our planet:

Bill Clinton was born on August 19, 1946. He was born in Hope Arkansas. He was the 42nd president of the United States. He was in office from 1996 to 2001.President Clinton was known for loving McDonalds and junck food and playing the saxophone.Chelsea Clinton is President Clinton’s daughter. Hillary Rodham Clinton is his wife. She is runing for President.President Clinton signed many laws as President. One of them was the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. This law says that moms with paying jobs can spend more time whith there babys after they are born.In 1999 President Clinton told the Army and the air force to go attack the Serbians who were killing the Albanians in Yugoslavia. The Albanians are people and he didn’t want them to get hurt.